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Neil LaBute Has a Thing About Beauty

Theatergoers will have barely settled into their seats at “Reasons to Be Pretty,” which makes its Broadway debut this week at the Lyceum, before they will be jolted by the profanity-laced rant of a young woman directed at her passive boyfriend all because he told a friend she had a “regular” face. The entire play hinges on this seemingly innocuous comment, which is why the billboard outside the Lyceum describes it as “a love story about the impossibility of love” written by “Neil LaBute, playwright and provocateur.” LaBute’s plays are, in fact, so provocative that some past audience members have walked out midplay or screamed out “kill the playwright” or slapped an actor’s face after a performance. And that makes a side of LaBute happy. “It’s part of my makeup,” he says, “to ruin a perfectly good day for people.”

If some audiences have not been so receptive to LaBute’s plays, critics have been kinder, seeing fresh and funny iconoclasm in works like “In the Company of Men,” “Your Friends and Neighbors” and “The Shape of Things” — especially foreign critics. “I’m big in London,” LaBute told me recently. “They identify with words, and my plays are stuffed with language. I also seem to reinforce their attitude toward Americans, which is why they associate me with their Angry Young Men playwrights of the ’50s.” But whereas writers like John Osborne focused their anger more narrowly on the stifling social and political strictures of British life, LaBute’s anger appears to be directed at humanity, as if, collectively, mankind had done him a great hurt and he is paying it back, bit by bit. In “The Shape of Things,” an attractive woman makes over a nerdy museum security guard into a heartthrob who falls in love with her. She reveals that he was just an art project (a prominent banner at her show says, “Moralists have no place in an art gallery”) and that she wanted to give him the illusion of love “without interest or desire.” In “Your Friends and Neighbors,” a character declares that sex is only sex, “not a time for sharing.”

LaBute’s ugliest characters are often the prettiest men. Paul Rudd, an actor and LaBute’s friend, says he believes that “Neil is fascinated by the handsome frat boys because they have this simmering rage” at life no longer being a golden romp for them. (The handsome misogynist in “Company” ignites the play with the line “Let’s hurt somebody” and later says, “I don’t trust anything that bleeds for a week and doesn’t die.”) LaBute described his own looks to me as “absolutely average, although my weight’s become another thing. But pretty guys have this glow. No matter how bad they are, people keep going back to them. Being pretty can bring out the worst in people. I always keep an eye on the pretty guy who can hurt me.”

Terry Kinney, the director of “Reasons,” told me that the LaBute he knows is nothing like his plays. Everyone I talked to who has known LaBute claims he is a very nice man. But then, how sure can they be? Rudd describes LaBute as “smart, funny and generous. He always picks up the check. . . . But the thing about Neil is, I’ve known him for years, and yet he’s unknowable. He’s mysterious.” Kinney said: “I know nothing about Neil outside our theater relationship. He never volunteers anything.” Bernard Telsey, an artistic director of MCC Theater, which is co-producing “Reasons,” told me: “Neil and I have had this incredible artistic relationship for eight years. I’d like to say ‘personal relationship’ too. But I don’t know anything about his personal life. Does he have a dog? I don’t know.”

Probably the one man in theater who knows LaBute best is the actor Aaron Eckhart. Their relationship goes back to the early ’90s, when both were active in theater at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah. “We had a special relationship,” Eckhart told me. “We were both Mormons. We liked ‘dark material.’ We’d have breakfast a lot. We discussed the work. Everything about Neil is about ‘the work.’ He has no time in his life for other stuff. We never discussed being a Mormon, or where his dark stuff came from, or his wife, or his dog — I think it was a shepherd.” Those would have been uncomfortable conversations to have with LaBute. “He’s elusive.”

LaBute is 46 years old and built like a bear, about 6-foot-2, 280 pounds. When we met at the Lyceum Theater on a cold, rainy day last month, he sat on a small sofa on the deserted stage and answered my questions in the soft voice of a man leery of questions. I asked him if he cursed as much in person as his characters do onstage. “I have a bit of a potty mouth,” he said. It was a strange expression from a master of profanity.

I asked him about the dark nature of his work.

“I write things on a page I don’t want to have to deal with in life,” he said. “Writing is a safe vacuum for me because I’m not saying those horrible things to someone’s face. On the page, I can always find the great retort that doesn’t come to me at the right moment in life. I feel I have a kind of bravado in my writing I don’t have in life.”

He went on: “Is there cynicism in my work? There’s not a side of me that wishes I was more cruel, and I act it out on the page. Still, there is some working out of that on the page, my bitterness seeping through. If you feel betrayed, you’re always on guard. It’s probably because of my father.”

LaBute, who was estranged from his father, Richard, when he died a few years ago, claims his father abused him when he was a boy growing up in Washington State. He gives no concrete details of that abuse, other than to say that his father had the power to hurt with words. He was a long-haul truck driver of frequent absences “and a full-time S.O.B.,” LaBute told me. “He was a smart guy trapped in a dead-end job. Today he’d probably be diagnosed as bipolar. Anything could set him off. He changed the temperature in the room. There was always that sense of dread when he came home. As a kid, I was quick-witted, and my smart mouth frustrated him.”

In a way, LaBute’s father paved the way for his son’s career. “He taught me the value of hard work,” LaBute said. “And the power of words to hurt.” He also taught LaBute to distrust men, and women — including his mother, apparently, about whom he said: “I wanted to tell her: ‘I was a kid! You should have protected me!’ ”

LaBute claimed he had no problems with his peers as a kid. “I was the president of the student government,” he said. “I was in the theater. I had some luck with girls. I never felt I was a loner, although I wasn’t the most social kid.” But LaBute’s teenage years may not have been as conflict-free as he portrayed them. “He alluded to the fact that he got picked on a lot,” Kinney recalled. “But he never went into details.”

After high school, LaBute attended B.Y.U. on a scholarship. It was there that he converted to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, although he wouldn’t tell me why, except to say that his conversion was about “faith.” But he added, “Americans have so many misconceptions about the church.” All those wives! People “barely survive one wife,” LaBute said. “How could I survive six?”

Rudd says he has no idea why LaBute joined the church, other than the speculation that it might have been “more for fellowship than for spirituality. I had a Mormon friend who told me Mormons were the kind of people who, if a member was sick, they brought that person food and mowed the lawn.” He adds, “Or maybe it was because he met a girl who was a Mormon.”

It may seem an odd fit, the creator of so many misanthropic characters and a religion of “fellowship,” but the relationship survived for a few years. LaBute even won an award from the Association for Mormon Letters for his play “In the Company of Men,” which is about two businessmen who seduce a deaf woman as a cruel joke, then dump her. But when LaBute wrote a devastating series of three one-act monologues, “Bash: Latter-Day Plays,” in which Mormon characters are portrayed as murderers, the church “disfellowshiped” him, essentially putting him into a state of limbo from which he never quite returned. Today, he told me, he is no longer a Mormon.

I asked LaBute about his wife, Lisa, a family therapist, and their breakup. (They met at B.Y.U. He refused to say whether they were now divorced.) He told me that the split had a lot to do with the dark nature of his writings — which even affected their two children, who were estranged from him for a while.

Then LaBute stopped. “I don’t want to talk about that,” he said. “And I wish you wouldn’t write about it.” (Later, LaBute e-mailed me through a publicist and said that if I didn’t mention his wife or kids or religion or misogyny that he’d tell me “a doozy of a childhood (personal) story that nobody knows about.”) LaBute stood up and said: “I have to go. I’m tired of answering questions.”

Photo

Neil LaButeCredit
Ryan Pfluger for The New York Times

“What about girlfriends? Are you seeing anyone now?”

“I won’t answer that.”

“O.K.,” I said. “I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”

“Only if you’re nice to me.”

It was impossible to tell if he was kidding. “Don’t worry,” I said. “Tomorrow I’ll just ask you about your innermost secrets.”

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“No problem. I’ll just make some stuff up.” For the first time in hours, he smiled.

The following morning I asked Bernard Telsey, LaBute’s longtime producer, how LaBute’s plays haved changed over the years. “Neil’s growing as a playwright,” he said. “In the beginning of his career, his plays were more shocking. That’s how he got attention. If he didn’t, he might not have a career now where he’s allowed to explore the human race on a more emotional level instead of a shock level. ‘Reasons’ will be his first play on Broadway, and more people will see it than any of his other plays.”

LaBute has a lot riding on “Reasons.” Money, to be sure, if “Reasons” succeeds. But more than that, “Reasons” gives LaBute a chance to change his reputation from a mere writer of “shock” plays. LaBute seems to want it all, to be known as a famous writer of every conceivable kind of play. (He is also a screenwriter, a short-story writer and a theater and film director.) After “In the Company of Men” — which came out as a movie in 1997 — he was labeled a misogynist, and after “Your Friends and Neighbors,” a misanthrope; a short time later, he directed the film “Possession,” a romantic love story that completely confused his audience. Then came “The Shape of Things,” which proved that he could write a play about a woman as hateful as the men in “Company.” Now there’s “Reasons,” a relationship play, and another play already completed, “The Break of Noon,” which is about religious faith. Next, he plans to direct a film comedy starring Chris Rock — “so I won’t be labeled in a box,” LaBute said. “It’s hard for people to believe I can do comedy.”

Before I left Telsey, Robert LuPone, another artistic director at MCC, stopped by. I asked him what he liked most about having LaBute as MCC’s resident playwright.

LuPone grinned and said: “He can rewrite. Other playwrights finish a play and think it’s set in stone.”

Telsey added: “Neil works off an audience’s response. He tinkers every night.” Sometimes LaBute will lurk in the back of the theater to gauge how his jokes are going over with the audience. “I’ll ask the actors,” LaBute told me, “how many times a joke worked. Then I’ll rewrite it. I’m French-Canadian, you know. French are the great collaborators.”

That night, I went to a restaurant in TriBeCa with a small stage where LaBute and two of the actors in “Reasons,” Thomas Sadoski and Piper Perabo, were reading from his works. At first, LaBute didn’t want me to go because he didn’t think he was a very good reader.

It was a small venue, holding maybe 30 or 40 people who responded to advertisements that began, “Reasons to Be Neil LaBute.” He did not disappoint them. Sadoski read a monologue from a racist white man in a polling booth who can’t persuade himself to vote for a black man because then the entire country will have to watch reruns of “The Jeffersons” night after night. Perabo read a rant from a woman who hated Muslims because they are “fearful and backward-thinking people.”

When I was driving back to my hotel, one of LaBute’s publicists called to tell me I dropped my notebook at the reading.

The following morning I went to a rehearsal of “Reasons.” LaBute greeted me and asked if my notebook had been returned. I said yes. Then he said, “When she found it, I just wanted to throw it as far from me as I could.”

Everyone sat down around a table to begin a read-through of the play. LaBute sat hunched over his script, his face very close to the page, as Marin Ireland, who plays the raging girlfriend, began her opening-scene tirade. Everyone laughed. LaBute’s lines were funnier coming from Ireland — whose face LaBute described as “riveting,” in its delicate, fine-boned planes — than they were as written. LaBute relies a lot on his actors to bring out in his plays what is missing on the page. “I always want to give the play back to the actors,” he told me. He said that his friendship with Eckhart was based on the fact that “I can’t do on a page what Aaron fulfills in my characters onstage. We fulfill each other’s needs. Our friendship is based on, We can do good work together.”

During the read-through, Kinney pointed out passages that had been rewritten by LaBute since the play was performed Off-Broadway. The rewrites were telling. They made the play slightly less acerbic, softening a character here and there. Kinney pointed out that Broadway is more greasepainty, more artificial than Off-Broadway. The most telling change came in a scene in a mall, where Ireland’s character reads a list of Sadoski’s character’s deficiencies out loud in a food court for eavesdroppers to hear. She complains about their unimaginative sex, his body odor, his physical appearance (his eyes “are small and piggish”), the size of his penis, his genital hairiness and, moreover, the fact that “you bite your own toenails . . . the most disgusting fact I know . . . you rip off your toenails with your teeth . . . and then eat them.” When she finishes in the Off-Broadway version, she tells Sadoski’s character that what she read was true, although she embellished his flaws a bit. In the Broadway version, she says: “I made it up . . . it’s not true. Any of it.”

LaBute spoke up: “I have a couple of notes.” He peered down close to the page and said, “I now question the word ‘overbearing’ on Page 32.” LaBute and Kinney and the cast discussed the word for a few moments. LaBute loves such tinkering. His scripts are never really finished in his eyes, he told me. He has written one play that has been published in three different versions — and it’s still not finished, he said, nor has it ever been produced.

Perabo offered LaBute some of her homemade cookies. LaBute took one, held it in both hands like a child and nibbled it. He and Perabo leaned toward each other and giggled like children in first grade. LaBute told me he loves the rehearsal process, the camaraderie, the give and take, the rewriting, the academic discussions about a word, a line, a reading. “I’m the kind of guy you have to kick out of the theater at 2 a.m.,” he told me on another occasion. “I’d build a set if I could. The theater is my way of communing with people.”

LaBute stood up and excused himself. “I have to call London,” he said. After his call, we talked in the lobby. I asked him if his plays smacked too much of art and not enough of humanity. He admitted that his plays can be “cold,” because his characters are intellectual constructs that come from his “imagination, not my life.” He went on: “People always assume if it’s in your head you must be it. That I’m the harshest characters in my plays, not the most delicate.” I asked whether he was the misogynist or the one who puts up with the abuse. “I’m not self-analytical,” he said. “I’m a mystery even to myself.” Was this, too, a deliberate construct, his way of manipulating us all, like the Wizard of Oz, who never dared emerge from behind his curtain?

LaBute smiled. “There’s definitely a bit of that,” he said. “Putting my readers on.” He acknowledged that, as an author, there’s “a good Neil and a bad Neil.”

Presumably Kinney would agree. “There is an element of every character in every playwright,” he said on an earlier occasion. “I think he’s a stone’s throw from the men in ‘Company.’ And the deaf girl they torture.”

Pat Jordan is a contributing writer for the magazine.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page MM28 of the Sunday Magazine with the headline: Neil Labute Has a Thing About Beauty. Today's Paper|Subscribe